Bid protests hit decade-low and undermine calls for ‘loser pays’ reforms
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By
Nick Wakeman
New data from the Government Accountability Office shows protests have declined 40% since 2016, while half of all cases result in relief for contractors or corrective actions by agencies.
Despite all the rhetoric about the need to rein in bid protests, the numbers just do not show protests as a growing problem.
If anything, it’s the opposite.
The newest edition of the Government Accountability Office’s annual bid protest report shows that a decade-long trend of declining protests continues.
GAO saw 1,688 protests filed in fiscal year 2025, down 6% from the 1,803 filed in FY 2024. Except for fiscal 2023, when protests rose because of the CIO-SP4 contract, bid protests have dropped steadily by 40% since fiscal 2016.
Despite the declines, bid protests continue to draw complaints with the familiar refrain that everything gets protested.
But the numbers do not support that wisdom of the crowd.
GAO handled 2,789 cases in fiscal 2016. The final number for FY 2025 came in at 1,688, or roughly 1,000 fewer cases.
In a report earlier this year, GAO said there could be several reasons for the decline over the last decade:
- Enhanced debriefings for defense contracts.
- An increase in the threshold for task order contracts
- An electronic protest docket system that charges a filing fee
In the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress asked GAO to look at changes to the protest process that included making unsuccessful protesters pay the costs of the government and the winning contractor. The argument in the 2025 NDAA is that there were too many protests without any merit.
GAO pushed back on this idea in a letter to Congress.
"We do not endorse creating a fee shifting process for bid protests because existing statutory authorities and bid protest procedures are sufficient to efficiently resolve and limit the adverse impacts of protests filed without a substantial legal or factual basis," GAO General Counsel Edda Emmanuelli Perez wrote in that letter.
Defense protests only effect 1.5% of DOD procurements, leading GAO to argue that the system was working and frivolous protests were rare.
The FY 2018 NDAA included a provision for enhanced debriefings for defense contracts, where the losing bidder gets to ask questions and DOD has to respond. The process gives losing bidders more insights into why they lost.
Enhanced briefings do take longer, but the number of defense contracts being protest has dropped faster than the overall downward trend.
DOD contracts accounted for 50.5% of protests in fiscal 2018. The percentage dropped to 44.2% in fiscal 2024, the most recent year GAO released data on defense contracts.
The proposed FY 2026 NDAA does not include any further recommendations or directions to GAO to address bid protests.
In addition to highlighting the continuing decline of bid protests, GAO also offers insights on the most common issues that lead the agency to sustain a protest and side with the protester.
The most common reasons for sustained protest are problems with the technical evaluation and an unreasonable cost or price evaluation. A third reason is an unreasonable rejection of a proposal.
But of the 1,688 protests, only 53 resulted in a sustained ruling that means a win for the protester. GAO denied 327 cases.
Over half of the protests – 52% – either ended up with a sustained ruling or some sort of corrective action by the agency to address an issue raised in the protest. GAO calls that number its “effectiveness rate” and it has held steady.